Dipoto talks about his love of stats — and SABR membership

From Bill Plunkett at the Orange County Register on April 10, 2012, on SABR member Jerry Dipoto:

It is somehow appropriate that the Angels' 2002 championship plays out as a barely mentioned afterthought in the book "Moneyball" – and as an alternate ending that never even made it to editing for the movie made from the book.

The baseball world was cleaved in two by the debate that Michael Lewis' examination of the A's and GM Billy Beane's team-building philosophy created. In the seasons that followed, you were either a "Moneyball team" with a "Moneyball GM" or you were not – and the Angels under former GMs Bill Stoneman and Tony Reagins were decidedly ... not.

"I'll tell you -- I'm both. I'm both," current Angels GM Jerry Dipoto said, the contrived parameters of that debate having blurred over the years as every organization looked, in varying degrees, to see what they could glean from the kind of statistical analysis that "Moneyball" brought into the spotlight.

"As a general philosophy ... I like to believe myself to be balanced and I think in making any balanced decision you want to be as objective as you can in making that decision. What statistical analysis does is allow you to be as objective as you can be. Now – I don't think I'm the only guy in the world that looks at the numbers. There are 30 clubs out there and I think every one of them looks at the numbers."

But not every one of them is run by a "card-carrying member of SABR," as Dipoto says he is. SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research) was organized in 1971 by a handful of baseball researchers and is now home to thousands of "seamheads." Dipoto said he joined about 20 years ago out of an "interest level" in the deeper examination of baseball's history and statistics. He believes he was the first active player to be a SABR member during his career as a reliever with the Indians, Mets and Rockies -- and he spoke at the SABR convention in Arizona last month.